Fourteen hundred farmers owning
200,000 acres in the Klamath River Basin of southern Oregon and Northern
California were denied their water rights during the summer of 2001
because of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). Nearly $200 million
of life savings and hard work were wiped out instantly as the farmers
were left with essentially worthless land. They are not alone. This
has been the legacy of the ESA from its inception. It has confiscated
billions of dollars of private property, harmed or destroyed the lives
of hundreds of thousands of Americans and has not saved one endangered
species! Not one.

The Klamath River incident reveals
a glaring problem of the ESA � the lack of or misuse of science. On
March 20, 2002, Rob Gordon, Executive Director of the National Wilderness
Institute (NWI), testified before the House Resources Committee on
H.R. 2829 and H.R. 3705 that would amend the Endangered Species Act
of 1973. In addressing the issues of quality of research used, Gordon
testified:

Under the current program the evidentiary
standards for listing are, in a word, bad. I use the word bad because
it is an apt acronym for �best available data.� The problem with best
available data, or BAD, is that best is a comparative word. Thus the
data need not be verified, reliable, conclusive, adequate, verifiable,
accurate or even good.

The NWI conducted a study in which
they found that over 306 of the 976 recovery plans for species listed
as endangered had �little to no hard information about the status
of listed species.� For instance, the plan for the endangered Cave
Crayfish cites �Sufficient data to estimate population size or trends
is lacking.� If there is not even sufficient data to estimate the
population size, let alone trends, then how could the USFWS even know
it was endangered in the first place? How could it write a recover
plan? The agency could not have. But it did anyway.

With this type of doubt, Secretary
of Interior Gale Norton commissioned The National Academy of Sciences
(NAS) to investigate the scientific basis for the recovery plans of
the suckerfish in the Klamath River Basin. The NAS reported in March
of 2002 that there was no scientific justification for keeping Klamath
Lake levels high by withholding its water from the farmers. On the
contrary, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) records reveal that
the sucker populations increased when the Klamath Lake was low and
decreased when it was high. Consequently, the USFWS recovery plan
would actually put the suckerfish in greater danger by maintaining
high lake levels! And they knew it!

Worse, government scientists are
not above actually planting evidence to support their anti-human beliefs.
In the fall of 2001, the U.S. Forest Service found that seven federal
and state wildlife biologists planted false evidence of a rare and
threatened Canadian lynx in the Wenatchee and Gifford Pinchot National
Forests in the state of Washington.

Had the fraud gone undetected,
it would have closed roads to vehicles. They would have banned off-road
vehicles, snowmobiles, skis and snowshoes, livestock grazing and tree
thinning. Representatives Richard Pombo (R-California) and John Peterson
(R-Pennsylvania) released a joint statement in which they were especially
critical of the incident:

As Americans, we should have been
astounded by the recent findings that federal officials intentionally
planted hair from the threatened Canadian lynx in our national forests
in order to impose sweeping land regulations.

None of the seven scientists received
any disciplinary action other than a hand slapping and reassignment
to another project. Retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist James
M. Beers called the false sampling amazing but not very surprising.
�I'm convinced that there is a lot of that going on for so-called
higher purposes.� This higher purpose is the nature-knows-best theology
of conservation biology. Untested, conservation biology is rooted
in the religion of pantheism where all human use and activity should
follow natural patterns within relatively homogenous soil-vegetation-hydrology
landscapes called ecosystems.

Such belief holds that the government
should not permit unnatural human development like roads, and activities
snowmobiling, livestock grazing and harvesting. Furthermore, ecosystems
cross unnatural property, county and state lines. Since conservation
biology ostensibly calls for holistic management of entire ecosystems
to protect the perceived fragile web of life, the rights of nature
must be superior to the rights of people, including their property
rights.

The religious zealousness driving
the ESA has become so prevalent that David Stirling, Vice-president
of the Pacific Legal Foundation wrote in 2002 that:

For three decades, environmental
purists have actively promoted the pantheistic notion that plant and
animal life rank higher on the species hierarchy than people. Their
"return-to-the-wild" agenda argues that human life activities are
the enemy of plant and animal species, and only through their efforts
to halt growth and shut down people�s normal and necessary life endeavors
will Mother Earth smile again.

Federal environmental regulations
like the ESA have destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of people,
closed entire communities, and confiscated hundreds of millions (if
not billions) of dollars of private property � all in the name of
protecting the environment. Michael Kelley of the Washington Post
Writers Group describes the brutality of the ESA in the July 11, 2001,
issue of MSNBC:

The Endangered Species Act�has
been exploited by environmental groups who have forged from it a weapon
in their agenda to force humans out of lands they wish to see returned
to a pre-human state. Never has this been made more nakedly, brutally
clear than in the battle of Klamath Falls.

Congress could not pass the ESA
using the Constitutional powers of Article 1, Section 8. Instead,
they used five international treaties and Article VI of the U.S. Constitution.
The ESA even extols the fact that it cedes sovereignty to the international
community by saying its purpose is to "develop and maintain conservation
programs which meet national and international standards." In a very
real way, U.S. citizens are going to prison, paying thousands of dollars
in fines and, in some cases, stripped of their life savings because
of international treaties.

Because the legal basis of the
ESA rests in international law, it has trumped the Fifth Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution. The Fifth Amendment supposedly protects
a landowner from a �taking� by the government for public use without
just compensation. While the ESA defines �harm� to mean �harass, harm,
pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to
attempt to engage in any such conduct,� for decades, federal agencies
arbitrarily extended the definition to take private property to protect
the species habitat. The U.S. Supreme Court legitimized this convoluted
interpretation on June 29, 1995 in Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of
Communities for a Great Oregon. In doing so, the Court ruled that
the word �take� included altering the habitat of an endangered species
� thereby allowing the government to take private land for an endangered
species without paying for it.

I think it unmistakably clear that
the legislation at issue here (1) forbade the hunting and killing
of endangered animals, and (2) provided federal lands and federal
funds for the acquisition of private lands, to preserve the habitat
of endangered animals. The Court's holding that the hunting and killing
prohibition incidentally preserves habitat on private lands imposes
unfairness to the point of financial ruin � not just upon the rich,
but upon the simplest farmer who finds his land conscripted to national
zoological use.

Tragically, Scalia was correct.
Writing for the Heritage Foundation on November 18, 1998, Alexander
Annett notes that: �Because of the Supreme Court ruling, the ESA empowers
the federal government to regulate any land that is thought to provide
�suitable habitat� for an endangered species � without proof of death
or injury to an identifiable animal that was caused by the landowners.�
As evidenced in Klamath Falls, zealous bureaucrats can impose arbitrary
and capricious habitat recovery plans on private property that instantly
strips the value � often their life savings � from a landowner.

The purpose of the ESA is to prevent
species from becoming extinct and then to help them recover to the
point where they no longer need protection. Yet, because landowners
face economic ruin if someone finds an endangered species on their
land, the landowner is motivated to destroy any habitat or otherwise
keep the endangered species off their land before someone finds it.
It is a recipe for failure.

Of the sixty species that have
been de-listed and supposedly �recovered,� twelve were actually extinct,
thirty were incorrectly listed in the first place or had data errors,
twelve were recovered due to actions resulting from other laws or
private efforts (not the ESA), and the balance were de-listed due
to management of U.S. Wildlife Refuges.1 The ESA has not been responsible
for recovering even a single species.

The ESA costs multiple billions
of dollars annually, but the landowners who happened to have the last
critical habitat needed by a species shoulder most of that cost. This
is neither fair nor just when the reason the species is endangered
results from the actions of society as a whole. The only solution
is for federal agencies to pay just compensation to landowners adversely
affected � just as the U.S. Constitution supposedly requires.

Paying for the huge costs of implementing
the ESA would expose the real cost to the taxpayers footing the bill,
forcing the USFWS and other agencies to prioritize what species must
receive protection to allow for their recovery, while putting less
emphasis on those species that are not in real jeopardy.

Imagine! The solution to finding
the balance between protecting species and the landowners of America
is in following the intent of the U.S. Constitution!

Posted
with permission by propertyrights.org and the American Land Foundation.

�
2003 Michael Coffman - All Rights Reserved

Dr. Michael Coffman is president
of Environmental Perspectives, Inc. and CEO of Sovereignty International
Corporation in Bangor, Maine.

Order:
Michael Coffman's Book
"The Birth of World Government"
$10.00 Plus $5.00 for S/H
Call 1-800-955-0116

Dr. Michael S. Coffman received his BS in Forestry
and MS in Biology at Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff, Arizona
and his Ph.D. in Forest Science at the University of Idaho at Moscow in
1966,1967, and 1970 respectively. Since then he has become a respected
scientist and ecologist who has been involved in ecosystem research for
over twenty years in both academia and industry. He taught courses and
conducted research in forest ecology and forest community dynamics for
ten years at Michigan Technological UniversityCa leading forestry school
in the Midwest. While there, he published a book on forest ecosystem classification
in Upper Michigan and Northern Wisconsin, which has become the standard
for classification in the region. He also assisted the U.S. Forest Service
in developing an Ecological Land Classification System for each of the
National Forests in Region-9.

Until 1992 Dr. Coffman was a manager for Champion
International, a leading forest and paper products company in the United
States. During his tenure with Champion, he became Chairman of the Forest
Health Group within NCASI (National Council for the Paper Industry for
Air and Stream Improvement), a respected scientific research group for
the Paper Industry. In this, and other related responsibilities, he was
responsible for millions of dollars of research and became intimately
involved in such national and international issues as acid rain, global
climate change, wetlands, cumulative effects and biological diversity.
During this time he was a spokesperson for the Paper Industry for the
media.

Dr. Coffman is currently President of Environmental
Perspectives, Inc. He also serves as Executive Director of Sovereignty
International, Inc and the Local Environment and Resource Network (LEARN).
He provides professional guidance and training in defining environmental
problems and conflicts, and developing solutions to specific issues as
well as the hidden dangers of international treaties and agreements that
threaten our Constitutional protections, especially property rights. He
played a key role in stopping the ratification of the Convention on Biological
Diversity (Biodiversity Treaty) in the U.S. Senate one hour before the
ratification vote by anticipating and exposing the unbelievable agenda
behind the treaty. He has written three books exposing the environmentalist
phenomenon; The Birth of World Government, Saviors of the Earth? The Politics
and Religion of Environmentalism, and Environmentalism! The Dawn of Aquarius
or the Twilight of a new Dark Age?

In his present capacity as Exec. Director of
Sovereignty International, Inc. he is intimately involved with the science
that drives the issue of global warming and sustainable development and
global political agenda behind the effort to create global governance.
Dr. Coffman speaks to a variety of groups nationally who are interested
in the scientific truth and political agenda behind global warming and
other environmental issues to advance global governance.

LEARN provides knowledge to local citizens on
how to help local government attain equal powers with the federal and
state governments in implementing environmental laws in order to protect
both the environment and the rights of local citizens.E-Mail:
mcoffman@adelphia.net

"The Endangered Species Act�has
been exploited by environmental groups who have forged from it a weapon
in their agenda to force humans out of lands they wish to see returned
to a pre-human state. Never has this been made more nakedly, brutally
clear than in the battle of Klamath Falls."